I'm new to linux friends tell me it's the bomb but I don't want to install on good computer until I get the hang of it,but the old laptop I'm tring to install it on all I get is a teal screen. Any ideas

A teal screen? Could you be more specific?

Does anything happen before the screen comes up? Which distribution? What is the make/model of the laptop?

The laptop is an old IBM ThinkPad 390E it goes through the whole set up with the login and password and when I type startx all I get is a teal Screen when it should go to desktop with icons to install to hard disk right.

You are still not very clear about it. teal means? You havent still answered above questions completely. Which distribution are you trying to install?????
And have you installed X ?

Happy b'day MS3FGX

@linuxlover.chaitanya: see definition 2 here

http://dictionary.reference.com/dic?...&search=search

teal is a colour!
hmmm, I think he is trying to say he boots the live cd, then logs in... then it hangs with a teal coloured screen
(teal= blue and green colour)

but yes, linux is 'the bomb'
good luck

Distruibution is fedora 8

Fedora 8 hey...
a pretty resource heavy distro. your computer has
# 333 MHz Mobile Pentium II (Dixon PII core)
# 256KB L2 cache, on die, running at full clock speed
# 64 SDRAM standard, 256MB max (66 MHz FSB)
(from http://loke.as.arizona.edu/~ckulesa/...formation.html)
is that right???

I am not sure about fedora 8... butng
from http://answers.yahoo.com/question/in...8050724AALkpAz

And, your computer having ram as low as yours, and a pretty slow processor... I would say that your system specs are TOO LOW to handle fedora.

Do it on a new computer, don't worry, it won't harm it...

I've only have 128 dimm and I've tried on newer computer runs fine but I was told that fedora 8 should run on this antique was trying to fix it up for mother-n-law win xp wont run not enough memory keeps freesing up with win xp, but was told should run fedora 8.

Your hardware doesn't meet the requirements for (graphical) Fedora 8 either, you still don't have enough RAM and your CPU is too slow.

If you really want to run Linux on that machine with a halfway modern interface and software, you will have to use something very lightweight like Slackware, Debian, Vector, Arch, etc; none of the big "friendly" distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu, etc) are going to run on that machine. Coupled with a light WM like XFCE or even FluxBox, you would have a relatively functional machine for basic web browsing and word processing.

Besides, running an older release of a distribution doesn't make a whole lot of sense; you would be using outdated and possibly insecure software. If you are going to do that, you might as well just install Windows 2000 and be done with it.

Thanks all for the help. I was afraid this IBM was to old for anything but win 98 but I tried.

You could still run something halfway modern on there. I mean, it will be an uphill battle, but try E-Live or perhaps even Xubuntu. Let us know how it goes.

I would also put my vote behind Dream Linux Desktop 3.5. Its based on Debian and has XFCE. So its small as well. Just around 200-250mb.

Don't give up on Linux yet. Assuming your mother-in-law is going to use it for typical websurfing, word processing tasks (sorry for the stereotyping , there are plenty of small distros out there. Check this link .